Posted
by
michael
on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @05:42PM
from the whew dept.

jaydee77ca writes "Garry Kasparov survived opening danger and played very precise, technical chess to draw Game 4 with black against X3D Fritz. The final match result is a 2.0 - 2.0 draw, proving yet again that the day of the machines has not yet arrived."

It's saying a whole lot that it beat him? I would hope that a machine calculating trillions of moves would be able to.
Like a lot of articles I've read, the machine can often pick excellent moves at any given time, but it lacks an understanding of the overall flow of the game, and big-picture strategy.
Those kinds of things are hard to figure out for a machine without a soul, even with near-infinite cycles to spend.
Until the machine can prove the game and calculate a way to draw every time no matter wha

Yeah, thank goodness for my soul. I'd hate to see how badly I sucked at chess if somebody extracted my soul.

I hate this sort of thinking. If the question is, "What is it that allows humans to think abstractly and formulate efficient and creative strategies in the face of novel situations?" answering, "a soul" is just sleight of hand to avoid admitting that we don't know. Positing that every human being has a soul explains nothing, and tells us nothing that we didn't already know. Slapping a label on a phenomenon isn't the same as providing an explanation.

The question in my mind is: Kasparov won the last two games. Had there been more than four games in the series, would X3D Fritz have won any games other than the initial two or has Kasparov figured out a strategy to beat Fritz?

Well, perhaps a human could have beaten him in game three *IF* he played the same anti-computer chess against the human in question. Presumably he would know he was playing against a human, and not waste moves on anti-computer techniques like that pawn move on the king's side.

It would be interesting to do a chess-based Turing Test. Have Kasparov play an exhibition with three simultaneous games, where he doesn't know which one is the computer. See if he can pick it out.

At some point, the decision making (rules) of the best players will be captured in code like other expert applications.

Attempts to make Turing type B (rulebased, heuristic) chess programs have failed so far, all strong playing programs today are of type A (brute force, with perhaps a little heuristics). You can't just make up simple rules for playing chess, those rules will not account for all possible positions on the board; what's good in one position can be instantly losing in another one.

It could be that in the future the best chess playing computer isn't programmed at all. Instead it's merely told what the rules of the game are and it's then left to figure out on it's own the best strategies to play. Sort of a genetic chess algorithm.

There is a good example of this put into practice by a researcher who was experimenting with neural nets implemented in FPGA chips to create rectifying circuits. He'd setup a random set of interconnections and then through elimination have a program make c

Yes, but that proves one thing still: Humans can apply different strategy against different opponents, computers have yet to do that. I think Kasparov would have applied a different strategy playing a human player. That is something a computer is not capable of.

Plus, Kasparov lost the first game and then learned his opponent strategies, another thing computers are not capable of.

The series ended in a draw essentialy because of one move. The move 5....a6 in game 3 by the computer is very interesting/controversial. A computer needs to be programmed to play to its strength, i.e open positions. This move reveals a fundamental flaw in the program. The computer chose this even though 6. c5 is among possible replies which forcibly closes the position. So, the programmers did not incorporate best algorithms to avoid closed positions. Instead of 5....a6 why did not the computer choose 5....Be7 which is more in line with convention and less likely to lead to a closed position?
But, whatever might be the case, it was a good show by Kasparov. He showed that computer software has a long way to go more than computer hardware to beat humans.

I disagree. The series may have ended in a draw because of one move, but it certainly wasn't that one. The most significant move in the game 32...Rg7 in game 2 by Kasparov.

Kasparov was trying to hold on for a draw in this game, while playing the disadvantaged black. He screwed one move and the computer pounced on him. Had he managed a draw in that game, he would have had an overall winning record for the series.

Which is the basic difference between playing chess against a computer vs playing chess against a human: the computer may fail to find general winning strategy without a clear short-term advantage attached (see game 3, the infamous f-pawn), but it will never make a horrible mistake like hanging a piece. (see game 3, 14...Bd6. Every commentator laughed it up over that one, being such an obvious trap, and I saw it a couple seconds later. With a human, you pause for a couple seconds - was that a blunder? did h

He showed that computer software has a long way to go more than computer hardware to beat humans.

No, computers have a long way to go to beat the masters.

I was an avid chess player in high school. I played on a national level a couple of times even.

I've since stopped playing as much, but I do play from time to time. i keep a chess program on my palm pilot. Some dumb free thing I downloaded from the internet. Even when I'm concentrating on the game, I still get my ass kicked on the higher levels.

Now, i am no champion by any account. I don't think my USCF rating when above 900 ever. However, I can still beat your average Joe that I sit down to play with. I doubt any average person would do so well against the palm pilot, either.

So when people say that this is finally where computers take the advantage over humans, i have to disagree. Computers took the advantage over humans a long time ago. Now it's just icing on the cake.

I get my ass kicked by most chess players I go up against but I have still beaten every comp player I have gone up against. Sure these aren't great programs but GNUchess is pretty powerful and has beat many 1000 rack players that I have asked to play it. The key is that you can trick a comp very easly. YOu hid your self behind many move victories so that the tree doesn't see it before it is too late.
Comps are good at repetitive testing of piles of options but it has no innovation and the inablity to see what is happening in the game. If you look at game 3 from this match Fritz didn't have a clue it was loosing until the end. All it knew was it evaluated the game to -1.5 which is meaningless when you can see it's impending doom easily.

So in short, the draw happened because the computer wasn't stronger than the human over the match?

You can imply that it was a single goof that ruined the computer, but we've twenty years of single goofs. These kinds of things are why the human mind is still in contention even after this many years of moores law.

The series ended in a draw essentialy because of one move. The move 5....a6 in game 3 by the computer is very interesting/controversial.

You are avoiding the fact that the computer (Deep Fritz, a highly regarded piece of chess software) has no idea how to play the position after 5.... a6. That position isn't lost, Fritz just handled it poorly because of the difficulties in programming the machine to deal with horizon effect. Any average chess player could have played the position better than Fritz did,

I think his strength is rather the opposite. IIRC when he played against Deep Blue he lost because the machine made a "human" move according to him - i.e. he said afterwards that one move Deep Blue made was impossible for a computer to calculate and thus he completely lost concentration because he was so sure that there was some cheating going on, i.e. human assistance behind the scenes - and there have of course been rumours about that afterwards and Deep Blue has been scrapped so nobody can prove them wro

Sigh. Such an obviously human-biased conclusion to what is indisputably one of the great achievments of computer chess. The fact that Fritz, running on rather modest hardware, drew Kasparov, is an incredible feat. The obvious followup is that the days of a human world champion are numbered. And most likely that number is most conveniently expressed in months, not years.

I am not trying to dismiss the feat, no. Chess as a human standing place against the machines are over since Deep Blue. But give credit where credit is due, the feat here is Kasparov's, one of the few humans alive today still capable of beating the machines anytime, anywhere.

It is an interesting coincidence that during the same few years computer chess entered adulthood the best chess player ever born was alive to hold the fort for a while longer. Probably not a coincidence, either.

Anytime, anywere... as long as the game is played using the traditional time rules. Nobody even tries to play against the top computers in 5-10 minutes per player games. Even the top players get smashed.

Anytime, anywere... as long as the game is played using the traditional time rules. Nobody even tries to play against the top computers in 5-10 minutes per player games. Even the top players get smashed.

They just need to use hardware as old as the opponent to make it a bit more fair. I can beat a 386 in a 5 minute game no problem, just by using a few no-fail techniques.

By looking at the games of this match, and the previous one where Kramnik played against a computer program (which one? was it Deep Fritz?), it seems to me that most of the computer's wins are due to terrible human blunders (see this match's second game, or emotional imbalance (as when Kramnik, after defeating the computer soundly in an early match, suddenly shifted to a very aggressive style, and lost badly). Hence you could attribute most of the computer wins to "defective hardware" on the human side.

The obvious followup is that the days of a human world champion are numbered.

The world chess champion will ALWAYS be a human, not a machine. A fork lift can lift much more than a human, but do we say that forklifts hold the world lifting record? A car can go much faster than a human, but is a car listed in Guinness under the fastest mile? Likewise with chess.

Just because computers are new doesn't make them any more or less a machine than a car or a fork lift, and calling a machine the "world champion" of anything is ludicrous.

The one-mile (1.609-km) land speed record is 1,227.985 km/h (763.055 mph), set by Andy Green in Thrust SSC in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA, on October 15, 1997. Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) completed its record-breaking run in a matter of seconds, but was the culmination of six years of work and a six-week on-site campaign. Two and a half years of research went into the shape of the Thrust SSC, and building the most powerful car ever too

Chinook [ualberta.ca] is called the World Champion of Checkers, though usually they say Man-Machine world champion.

In our time, we are accustomed to forklifts and cars "out-performing" us and so we take no special notice. We are now on the verge of machines beating us at our own game so to speak. Probably they will have a first and only machine as the chess world champion, then it will be been there, done that and the people who like to play people will continue on as before and the programmers who like to out program

This phase will pass. They used to race cars against horses, and for a time they might have lumped them together in a speed record/contest.

But there's no motorbikes in the Kentucky Derby.

I think competitive human chess will survive long after machines are much better at the game. It'll be interesting to see if play styles wildly diverge once computers are both better than us and geared to playing each other.

The world chess champion will ALWAYS be a human, not a machine. A fork lift can lift much more than a human, but do we say that forklifts hold the world lifting record? A car can go much faster than a human, but is a car listed in Guinness under the fastest mile?

This is psychologically different. Many animals can lift more weight or run faster than we can, and that has been true for as long as humans existed. However, we were the best in chess.

You can ensure that the word "champion" is reserved for humans, but the honor will be as hollow as the difference in skill between the human champion and the best machine player.

You know, I see it exactly the other way around. I think it's an amazing testament to the level of complexity the brain can model that something calculating millions (billions ?) of moves by brute force is not eating the human alive. (Possible poor choice of metaphor:-)

Consider that the brain evolved to keep the person alive (primary funciton), and then think about just how "over-engineered" ("engineered" firmly in quotes:-) it really is for that task.

People are amazed at what humans achieve using their brains, but it pales into insignificance compared to the brain itself. The only reason it's not given the recognition it deserves is that it's commonplace and mundane. That doesn't make it one iota less remarkable, however.

What is truly most amazing is that a human can beat the computer at all. Though running at a substantialy lower frequency (around 30mhz or so) and not specificly designed to exclusivly play chess.... a man has the capability to play against the sum knowledge of hundreds of engineers combined with many more researchers and millions of dollars of investment in hardware and more.

You see for kasperov , playing the game is only a tiny portion of his minds capability. While playing the game his subconscious is

No joke, people were tampering with the machine during that match. IBM even altered its opening book after the game had already started. Some even accuse IBM of allowing on of the programming team--a GM--to enter moves during one game. Why would IBM cheat? Gee I dunno, but its stock price soared the day they announced that Deeper Blue won.

That accusation is an outrageous lie! Ken Thompson was personally responsible for such a thing not happening and said that the moves had come from the machine not from human intervention. Also IBM did not alter opening book of DB after a game started. Which game is that?

We aren't talking about terminator-style robots yet, bud. Robots are still slow and non-bullet proof, and "see" about as well as I do without glasses swimming in a dirty lake. I'll take that bet and give you odds.

I don't understand how a computer that can compute millions of moves a sec. and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win? Even a home computer I would think could compute thousands of moves a sec. How could any person possibly out think that???

I don't understand how a computer that can compute millions of moves a sec. and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win? Even a home computer I would think could compute thousands of moves a sec. How could any person possibly out think that???

While the computer can be programmed to "look ahead" for N moves, the computer must also be programmed to pick a move eventually, what is programmed to be the "best move". And all this programming is done by humans.

Basically it breaks down to the fact that the computer doesn't know (and isn't learning) "strategy". It's choice of moves are based largely on analyzing the possible outcomes and choosing the one that is most likely to result in victory.

However, since a human can form their own strategy (often, and why I don't like man vs. computer chess, in a way that just confuses and/or plays on the computers weaknesses), the human has an inherent advantage that obvio

2) People don't play by accurately calculating probabilities and choosing the most mathematically-likely-to-be-propitious move; they do something else. Whatever that "something else" is--and no one yet understands it in a pure-mathematical, mechanically reproducible way; and maybe that's not even possible--the computer's strategy isn't better.

It could only look 12-20 moves into the future, and Kasparov played in a manner to limit what the computer could see by looking ahead. Since the computer had no strategy, but rather always took the best move he could see at the moment, Kasparov could keep him blind and cornered so it didn't see anything usefull to do in the short term, so it ended up flailing about somewhat (notice where it moved a peice and then moved it right back). Then all the meanwhile he was slowly playing out a much longer strategy.

I don't understand how a computer that can compute millions of moves a sec. and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win? Even a home computer I would think could compute thousands of moves a sec. How could any person possibly out think that???

Computers can look at many more positions per second than a human but that is not as helpful as you would think because most of the positions examined are bad ones. While humans compare poorly in linear computational

> and probably 20-50 or more moves deep in a fairly short amount of time could possibly not win?

Not 20-50 moves deep, closer to 19 half moves. And even that doesn't guarantee victory.

For a textbook case of how to beat a computer, look at game 3. Kasparov went to a closed position, kept material on the board, and slowly forced it back. Meanwhile, the computer could never see what hundreds or thousands saw - that its only chance was to push pawns on the king side. Unfortunately, even seeing 19 half-moves

Why man vs. machine is so important to us is a little baffling. While it might be nice for our egos, what does this really do for the game of chess? Does the challenge make people better chess players? Maybe. Should we consider this any more interesting than a normal game between grandmasters?
The Terminator mentality somewhat bothers me, that we feel so insecure about ourselves that we have to congratulate people when they can do something better than a tool can!
(Personally I root for the block of sil

I dunno, seems to me that if a machine can beat 99.9999(ad nauseum) percent of humanity, that day might be here already.

It's also interesting to note that a computer who has defeated almost every human it encounters could, in a matter of seconds, communicate precisely how to do so to other computers. When a person beats a computer at something, they can tell their friends "kinda" what their logic was. But the speed of knowledge transmission and the accuracy of it would be far inferior to what a computer can do.

All the machines would have to do is give each one a specific problem to solve. As soon as one computer solves its problem, it immediately communicates its results to all the other machines, provided there is connectivity between them. Now all those other machines know exactly how to solve the problem too.

I was just wondering, how will the chess world handle cyborgs? Will people who have electronic "enhancements" be considered to be cheating? Heck, will they even have time to play chess, or will they be too busy taking over the world? What does everyone else think?

I was just wondering, how will the chess world handle cyborgs? Will people who have electronic "enhancements" be considered to be cheating? Heck, will they even have time to play chess, or will they be too busy taking over the world? What does everyone else think?

Oh, man, you are opening a huge can of worms on this one. Here's just a few ideas to think of:

If you have cybernetic enhancements will you be required to disclose this information to your doctor? The government? Your employer?

The players alternate white and black pieces each game. White has an advantage in chess (due in part to it making the first move). Having an odd number of games would give one player the white pieces in one extra game thus giving that player an unfair advantage in the match.

Part of the problem is that Kasparov is this generation's GM. Kasparov plays very emotional games. He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win.

This is a great strategy against people, but it's not so effective against computers. Kasparov is probably the worst chess master to pit against a machine since Ruy Lopez (I think he's won with the Ruy Lopez opening a few times, case in point: it's a brutal and hu

The "day of machines" is not when a man-made computer can beat a human at chess. Chessmaster kicks my ass all the time, but that doesn't mean my Athlon PC dominates me. I can still turn the bitch off, or program it to eat itself.

No, the "day of machines" is when machines can create and operate without any human intervention. Clearly, machines can be made to be stronger than humans, and perhaps one day they can be smarter (in everything, not just a highly-specific application). When machines can be both unequivocally stronger and smarter than humans, and do not have to rely on humans to create and maintain themselves, then we'll have a "day of machines".

Meanwhile, my Windows PC can't manage to stay running for a whole day. My Linux server and my PowerBook can, though. Microsoft is fighting to stem the tide of the "day of machines", but Apple and Linux zealots are pushing it forward and will be the death of us all!

Under the subtle cover of JbS (Jackboot to Kasparov's shin), Karpov introduces a third bishop into play.

8. LIF-KRE d8-e7

Kasparov responds with his trademark LIF-KRE (Left index finger to Karpov's right eye).

9. d4Xe5 $^$%#$

Karpov instinctively howls in pain and immediately offers uncouth theories concerning the likely species of Kasparov's parentage to general audience.

10. Q - KLN Q-KLN

Mutual exchange of Queen to opponent's left nostril.

GAME SUSPENDED FOR TEN MINUTES BY JUDGE

11. c3-d5 e7-d8

It appears the hostility between the chess masters has subsided.

12. SsKH BRHAKH

It appears the judge was mistaken. 10-pound sledgehammer swung by Kasparov in a bold attempt to pin down Karpov's head.(SsKH) Karpov immediately falls back on the classic Beretta Defense (9mmRc-HsAKH - 9mm pistol removed from concealed shoulder holster and aimed at Kasparov's heart)

13. KRMcC...

Kasparov revs hidden McCulloch chainsaw.

GAME DECLARED A DRAW BY OFFICIALS

14. KRTT-JF KRTT-JF

Both express extreme displeasure at judges' decision and cunningly respond with the little-known Rin-Tin-Tin Gambit (politely urinating at judges' feet)

14. KKRF-AP

Kasparov and Karpov removed forcibly from arena by angry policemen.

Game 3 is obviously over. Now, for a play-by-play analysis, Mikel Erickson and Michel Joseph from the World Chess Federation.

Erickson: You know, I really feel that Kasparov took control of the match when he attempted to pierce Karpov's cornea. I thought that took real determination, and proved Kasparov's dominance in the cutthroat world of chess.

Joseph: Unfortunately, I can't agree with your assessment of the situation. I'm squarely behind Karpov here. Kasparov didn't display any of the personal integrity I think is critical for a champion. I liked Karpov's honesty with his fifth move, but the way Kasparov concealed that sledgehammer just goes to prove you can't judge a book by its cover.

Erickson: Oh yeah! Well, let me tell you what I think of a certain chess commentator I'm being forced to share this mike with!

The easiest way to describe why Kasparov loses to a computer is because he is human. How often does he play his best chess? Not often - he's human.

The computer, on the other hand, always plays its best chess. So we are often comparing the computer's best vs. Kasparov's weak or mid-level chess, i.e. *mistakes*.

I don't think that Kasparov playing his best and making no mistakes would have any trouble with current computers. But *with* mistakes and fatigue and such...sure.

So the question really becomes, is it as fun to have the computer win when Kasparov makes a mistake? I don't think so. I think the real fun comes when he plays the best he can, is sure he can win, and has the computer do some wicked shit that no one has ever seen. When they staring thinking like humans - only better.

That doesn't seem to have happened yet. They simply have gotten good enough to be able to pounce on GMs that make mistakes, but not on good GMs that don't.

I always considered electronic chess a programming challenge. Hardware should be secondary to it, we pay too much attention to it. A supercomputer with inferior software is fast inferior computer. Let the programmers be the heroes, not the hardware.

Theoretically, if both sides play perfectly then every match will end in a draw. So what if Kasparov plays perfectly? Obviously he's lost before, so he doesn't all the time, but it's certainly possible that he could, at least for one game (people play less-complicated games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, perfectly all the time). If so, then no matter how good the computer played it could only draw him. So really, I think chess isn't really an accurate indicator of when 'the day of the machines' is here (or not).

> Theoretically, if both sides play perfectly then> every match will end in a draw

Where did you pull this "fact" from? Chess isn't like noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe); it isn't possible to map out every combination of every move and prove that a draw is guaranteed if each player makes the right moves.

It's quite possible that a "perfectly played" game will end in a white win; it's generally accepted that there is a small advantage to playing white. Alternately, it's plausible that a perfect ga

It was a pretty big deal when Babbage built a machine that could do basic arithmetic. I'm sure people thought of his Difference Engine as being a "smart" machine, particularly since it could generate tables of numbers a good deal faster than a human. But if you looked at the machine, it was all cogs and shafts and springs and levers... I'm sure that once you got over the astonishment that a machine could do this seemingly difficult thing, you'd look at it and know that it really was still just a machine, and not truly a thinking thing.

We consider ourselves to do this mysterious thing we call "thinking," but we don't understand in a precise way what this means. It could be that our brains work in an algorithmic fashion, or at least that our brains can be simulated by a machine that works in an algorithmic fashion. The former seems unlikely to me, the latter very likely. Is there a difference between actual thinking and simulated thinking? It's hard to say.

When you look at these chess-playing computers, they're pretty amazing. They can certainly play one hell of a game of chess. But when you get right down to it, they're really solid-state versions of cogs and shafts and springs and levers. Are they thinking? (I want to say 'no', but I can't prove it.) Are they simulating thinking? (Maybe... it's hard to say since we don't know what thinking entails.) Is there a difference?

So let me get this straight, we send out best guy in and he plays to a
draw and so the days of the machine aren't here? WTF are you smoking?
Kasparov draws and you think you or I or some other chess hack (yeah,
I play some games online, gone a few rounds with the chessmaster) has
a snowball's chance in hell against Fritz? No way. Fritz is like the
terminator robot, you have to pull his plug and squeeze him in an
industrial press for you or I to beat him at chess, either that or dip
him on hot lava.

Did anyone else think the "3D" part of this was complete BS on a level that would have made Barnum proud? It seemed to me that the whole point of this match was to show off the stupid display screen.

I got to see a bit of the fourth round on ESPN during lunch (without being in audio range, and it wasn't closed captioned either) and it was amusing how much it really was like watching paint dry without the commentary, and it was also amusing how dorky Kasparov looked with the goggles on.

One thing that has been pointed out by numerous posters is the belief that the final result of the match is the result of one bad move in one of the earlier games.

This is not necessarily meaningful. Either player could have played better or worse in any of the positions that came about in the ensuing games, making the actual match results the stuff of speculation about alternate universes.

Be that as it may, two things stand out about the match. The first is that the computer opponent is actually a commercial program running on commercially available hardware and not on specialized circuitry out of a lab somewhere. This alone is a very good indicator of how far computers have come as chess players. Not too long ago (at least in geological terms), there wasn't a chess program on earth that could win against the like of me. Nowadays, by contrast, commercial desktop hardware combined with shrinkwrapped software are giving a former world-champion a run for his money.

The second point of interest in the final game is Kasparov's choice of defenses.

Kapararov is one of the world's greatest experts on the opening--someone who prepares not just against continuations but against his most likely opponents--and yet, with the game and the match on the line he, chose to not play any of the 'milder' defenses to 1.d4 (for example, trying to reprise the line of the Gruenfeld he played against Karpov in one of their matches) but instead chose to play the black side of the Queen's gambit accepted.

When I was growing up and studying, the queen's gambit accepted was known to offer white good chances to develop a strong initiative based on black's disadvantages in central space and white's rapid development, and venturing the black side of Queen's gambit accepted was considered risky.

Apparently, Kasparov knows something I didn't when I was fifteen (duh).

Still, Kasparov's choice of opening certainly led to a difficult position requiring an accurate defense after white developed significant pressure on black's central pawn and on the queenside. However, the pressure rapidly dissipated following a set of exchanges that even gave black a short-lived counterattack on white's king position, leading to a position with even material and no real sources of play for either side, hence the draw.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened in a longer match played under a different winning criterion like 'best-of-ten' or 'first to achieve a given score.'

If you read the analyses, there's some advice for beating chess computers.

Chess computers have large opening databases. If they can make a database move, while the human has to think, the computer gets the edge due to the reduced amount of time they need to make a database move.

During the games, Kasparov tried to play unusual moves in the opening to knock the computer out of its database as early as possible. One example from game 2 is Kasparov's move 8...Re8, which is annotated with "This move by Kasparov had never been played before in this exact position." This knocked Fritz out of its opening database, and forced it to calculate.

A more striking example of the way to beat chess computers is the great wall of pawns that dominated game 3. Chess computers cannot evaluate such positions properly. If you built a wall of pawns like that, and snuck your forces behind them, you are a good chance of winning because the computer cannot calculate deeply enough.

What, if any, is the difference between "simulated intelligence" and "actual intelligence"? How do you know that our brains don't function as massivlely parallel search/inference engines?

Discussions about AI usually degenerate pretty quickly into arguments about whether or not we have some invisible, intangible, God-given "soul" or "spirit" or "spark." You're use of the phrase "*miracle of real intelligence*" would lead me to guess that you'd probably come down on the side that favors such a thing.

We humans are self-aware, yet we have not yet explained the mechanism of our self-awareness. Many of us assume that it therefore cannot be explained, that it is miraculous. I think that's a poor assumption. It may be, however, that we are incapable of understanding our own self-awareness, and incapable of understanding our own intelligence. Whether that's true or not, it does not follow that other animals and even machines cannot develop intelligence.

Why is it necessary to build a machine that plays chess "*as a human does*"? It's unlikely that any two humans play chess the same way, so which human would you have the machine emulate? Wouldn't it be better to build a machine that plays chess its own way?